


Spin

by StratusCloudSurfer



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Airplanes, Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, Flying, M/M, Pilots, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26625184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StratusCloudSurfer/pseuds/StratusCloudSurfer
Summary: “I need to relieve some stress. Want to fly with me?”Red turned around, shocked. Blue was holding up the keys to the oldest plane they had on the ramp, the plane designated specifically for spin training.“You want me to fly with you in that airplane?” asked Red incredulously.“Uh, duh,” said Blue, rolling his eyes. “What other plane would we be able to do spins in?”(The namelessshipping flight instructor AU that absolutely no one asked for)
Relationships: Ookido Green | Blue Oak/Red
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Spin

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this was a labor of love. As an aviator I love flying, and that's what I wanted to capture in this story. However, sometimes it is hard to describe flying on a basic level because it is something I am intimately familiar with. My goal with this was to describe flying in the least complicated, most understandable way possible, but even then I acknowledge that some of the vocabulary I use here might not make much sense to someone who has never flown before. 
> 
> So for some context, spins are a maneuver that pilots practice recovery from in case of emergency. Its the classic downward spiral that's often associated with big fiery crashes. At some point, depending on the aircraft you're flying and its design, spins may reach a point at which they become unrecoverable. Therefore, it is important for pilots to practice the recovery procedure so that if it does happen in real life, you can break the spin quickly enough to prevent a crash. To do this, we do flights in which we force the airplane into a spin, and then follow a set of memorized steps to break out of the spin. Spin training is the closest most pilots get to aerobatic flying. It's sort of like riding a roller coaster, but, you know, at 6000 feet above the Earth and strapped in a single-engine airplane. It's absolutely the most thrilling thing I've ever experienced, but I suppose that could change if I took some lessons in aerobatics. 
> 
> Oh, and the 'yoke' is the control stick that is used to change pitch (up/down movement of nose, often associated with climbing/descending) and roll (which wing is up vs. which is down, used to turn the aircraft) and the 'rudder' refers to two pedals on the floor of the aircraft controlled by the pilot's feet, which determines yaw (left/right movement of nose).

Red shook his head and sighed down at the message he had just received from the student he was supposed to meet with twenty minutes ago. He had a cold, apparently, and didn’t think he was safe to fly in his current condition. That, evidently, he couldn’t have told him about before the lesson was supposed to begin. Red considered himself to be a patient person, but couldn’t resist the frustration that built in his stomach. It was hard to remain patient after the long day that he had endured. It was 3 pm, and the clouds that persisted all morning, ruining his plans with numerous students, had finally lifted and the afternoon skies were clear and beautiful. He had finally gotten the chance to fly--to make the time he had spent sitting at the flight school worth it, to at least make a little bit of money--and then his student had cancelled on him.

It shouldn’t have really been a surprise, he supposed. This particular student was notorious about cancelling lessons. In the flight school he worked for, there were always a few students like that, who kept making excuses not to meet, who didn’t seem to really even want to. Students that spent years working on a single rating using their parents’ money. Of course, there were students on the opposite end of the spectrum, too--who would stop at nothing to fly, regardless of the time of day, the weather conditions, or their physical status. One of his own students came to mind at the thought, and he was debating texting her and asking if she wanted to fly with him instead when the door opened and Blue came back in from the flight line.

One look at him told him that the flight that he had just gotten back from hadn’t been pleasant. He immediately huffed out a breath, dropping his flight bag down on the surface of the desk that Red was sitting behind. He briefly caught his eyes and shook his head sharply, a wordless, exasperated motion. His brown hair was tousled and he had a slightly wild look in his hazel eyes.

“That bad, huh?” Red asked.

“Yeah,” Blue agreed in a breathless exhale. “I’m honestly kind of surprised I made it to the ground alive after that.”

He snorted a laugh. He couldn’t help it. He knew it wasn’t funny that Blue’s student had done something dangerous enough to be labelled life-threatening, but this kind of thing happened so often in their line of work that it was almost a contest at this point. Who had narrowly escaped death by flight student more times? So far, Blue was winning, but Red wasn’t far behind—not that it was a contest he wanted to be the champion of.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Later,” Blue said, just as his student came through the door.

Blue quickly ushered his student down the hallway and into a little back room of the flight school that was used for flight planning, and often, briefing and debriefing lessons. Red was left alone with his thoughts and the image of the cheery blue sky outside of the window. He stared out at the orange windsock floating lazily at mid-field, its tail kicking up occasionally with tufts of wind.

God, it was perfect. He thought more and more about texting his student. He was all but certain she would agree to meet with him. He wasn’t sure it was the best idea, though, because he had flown with her yesterday twice, in the morning and late in the evening, and he was scheduled to fly with her tomorrow, too. She probably didn’t need to fly today.

At least, that was what he was going to tell himself as an excuse to cover the demotivation that slammed into him all at once. Suddenly, he wanted to just give up on today, to go home and sit his ass on the couch and mindlessly scroll through his phone. It was even more tempting a thought when he pictured Blue sitting next to him with his head on his shoulder, doing the same. He didn’t think that he had another flight today. He could just go home with him. He would just fly extra with his students for the rest of the week to make up for the revenue he didn’t make today. Plus, he and Blue had been so busy the past week that they had hardly spent any time together at all aside from sleeping with each other. The weather had been nice for the past seven days all the way up until today, when the clouds rolled in and kept the clouds hanging low. Blue had a few students working on their instrument ratings, who were learning to fly in the clouds, without visual reference, so he had been absent this morning, too. Red, at the moment, did not, so all of the flights that he had planned for this morning had needed to be pushed back for the poor weather conditions. Although they lived in the same apartment, and had for about the past year or so, he found that he missed him. A lot, actually.

_You know what?_ He thought. _Screw it._ He was going home with Blue as soon as he was done with his student. It had been long enough since they’d spent quality time together. Maybe he’d even take him out to dinner tonight. He didn’t want to waste any time cooking, and he didn’t want Blue to, either.

He was considering their options in terms of restaurants when Blue came back, his student in tow.

“...so, remember, when you turn base to final and you’re slow, you need to add more power, and keep the airplane coordinated as you turn,” he was saying, talking calmly and gesturing with his hands as he walked the kid to the door. “So, you know what you need to work on. I’ll see you Friday, then.”

“Okay,” the student said, nodding, clutching his flight bag to his chest. “Thank you.”

“No problem. Drive safe.” Blue held the door open for him as he walked out, and Red would have considered it a polite gesture if he didn’t know that Blue was doing it to get rid of him faster. As soon as he was gone, Blue turned back to him and widened his eyes dramatically, scoffing as he shook his head.

Red couldn’t help but grin at his expression. He looked extremely cute right now, despite how annoyed he must have been.

“So, are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Oh, the usual. You know, the infamous base-to-final death turn.”

Red nodded. He was very familiar with the turn in question. The student overshot the turn that put the aircraft on a straight line descent path to the runway, and then attempted to turn back on course without using proper rudder coordination. They pulled back on the yoke, an instinctual attempt to keep the aircraft from the ground, which tended to look much closer the lower they descended, and let their speed drop off. The aircraft reached a point at which the air separated from the wing, resulting in the wings being unable to generate enough lift to keep the aircraft airborne. The result was a very dangerous situation that had killed many, many pilots, and was sure to kill many more. It was practically the recipe for inducing what was known as a spin. A spin was an uncoordinated, corkscrewing descent straight to the ground, and at such a low altitude, it was nearly impossible to recover from before crashing.

“‘Keep the ball centered,’ I said. ‘Put the nose down. Add power.’ Did he listen? No. Of course not. I had to take flight controls to keep him from making us a giant smoking hole in the ground.”

Blue moved past him and to the drawer of the desk, shoving the aircraft keys attached to its assigned clipboard back into it. Red noted his proximity, catching the familiar scent of his cologne.

“What are you doing now?” asked Blue with a huge sigh, as if letting out the last of his irritation.

“Nothing, really,” said Red. “My last student just cancelled.”

“Why?” Blue demanded. He waved absently to the window, and the clear blue sky beyond it. “It’s gorgeous.”

“He says he’s sick,” Red said, frowning. “He’s been sick the past six lessons.”

“You could just stop trying to meet with him, you know,” said Blue.

“Yeah, but that would be mean.”

“Would it? Sounds like he doesn’t want to fly, anyway.”

Red opened his mouth to argue, but before he could, Blue blurted, “I need to relieve some stress. Want to fly with me?”

Red turned around, shocked. Blue was holding up the clipboard to the oldest plane they had on the ramp, the plane designated specifically for spin training. A spin was a dangerous thing to do in an aircraft that wasn’t designed to do them, but learning how to recognize and recover from spins was considered an important part of flight training, and it was a requirement to become a certified flight instructor. Thus the flight school they worked for had a designated spin plane, in which spins were safe to practice. The plane in question was used only for spin training, and thus was less advanced than the other aircraft on the ramp. It was a Cessna 172 at least ten years older than they were, with traditional “steam gauge” instruments, the back seats taken out, and a permanent sign in the cockpit that warned pilots not to top off the fuel tanks for weight and balance purposes.

“You want _me_ to fly with _you_ in that airplane?” asked Red incredulously.

“Uh, duh,” said Blue, rolling his eyes. “What other plane would we be able to do spins in?”

Red’s eyebrows lifted. “You want to do spins?”

“That is what I’m saying, yes,” said Blue, as if it were the most rational suggestion of all time, and Red was just a dumbass for not seeing his logic. “So, you in or out?”

Red stared at him in utter disbelief for several seconds. Was Blue seriously suggesting intentionally turning an airplane upside down, then sending it hurtling nose-first into the ground, to relieve stress? And after he had been complaining about his student almost killing him by almost doing the maneuver in question? He had already suspected that Blue was insane, but now he was completely sure.

Staring into his serious eyes, though, excitement built in his stomach. He found himself fighting a smile. Blue was completely insane… and he loved it.

“I’m in,” he said. “...but you have to preflight.”

Blue grinned back, an amused light dancing in his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Just make sure you’re not going to get sick. If you throw up on me, you’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”

Blue conducted the preflight “walk-around” inspection with a casual scrutiny that was only achievable through years of doing the same checklist over and over again. He probably could have completed the ritual without even consulting the checklist in his hand, but like any good pilot, he followed it with his finger as he checked the essential items on the outside of the aircraft for any noticeable discrepancies that might render their flight unsafe.

As he was inspecting the fuel from the right wing tank for any contaminants, Red plugged in his headset to the headphone jack on the right side of the cockpit and adjusted the seat. “So you’re taking the right seat, then?” Asked Blue. He ran his fingers along the wingtip. “I can’t remember the last time I made a landing from the left seat, so this ought to be interesting.”

Red turned to him. “I can move, if you want,” he said.

Blue shook his head. “No, it’s fine,” he assured him. He flashed a confident grin. “Like I could forget how to land an airplane.”

A few minutes later, he finished the last of the preflight and plugged his headset into the left side. Red climbed inside the airplane when he did, pulling the door closed after he put on his seatbelt. Blue soon joined him, securely pulling the second door closed, enclosing him and Red in the tiny, quiet space together. A thrill ran through him as Blue slammed the door handle down with a note of finality, locking it in place. It hadn’t been that long since he’d flown with Blue--they flew with each other regularly to maintain the flight currency they needed as flight instructors to remain legal--but it had been a long time since he had done spins. He tried to play it cool outwardly, but inwardly, a nervous excitement rushed through him, and adrenaline made his heart pound beneath his skin. Spins were the closest they could get to doing acrobatics as lowly, regular flight instructors, after all.

“Alright,” Blue began, placing the checklist on his thigh and planting his finger on it. “Before Starting Engine Checklist…”

Red absently followed his own checklist as Blue called out the items and performed the steps needed to start the engine. He knew, deep down, that everything they were doing was completely safe. The aircraft wasn’t overloaded, the center-of-gravity was within limits, and the aircraft was in perfectly good shape. Besides that, Blue was probably the safest person he could have thought of to practice spins with, as he had done lots of them in the past few months. Many of the other instructors at the flight school didn’t particularly like doing spins, and Blue was up-to-date on his spin training, so he ended up flying with a lot of the newer students for their first spin flights. Spin training wasn’t a requirement to receive a private pilot license, but it was a requirement of the flight school that students complete at least one spin flight before their first solo flight. Still, the prospect of practicing such a potentially dangerous maneuver made his heart rate pick up.

Before he could think about it any more, though, the propeller sputtered and whirred a few times before roaring to life. “Nice!” Blue commented, shouting over the noise. Red donned his headset and waited. Blue flipped a switch, and the avionics came to life. He put on his headset, as well, adjusting the microphone and tapping it a few times.

“Radio check?” he asked after a moment or so, his voice coming in staticky but definitely audible through his headphones.

“Loud and clear,” Red replied, turning down the volume on the instrument panel so that Blue’s next transmission wouldn’t blow his eardrums out.

“Alright, awesome. Looks like our ammeter is good, our oil pressure is good, radios are set… We should be good to go,” Blue announced. He shot him a grin. “You ready for this?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Red replied. Blue chuckled at him as he dialed in the frequency for the weather reporting system on the airfield and pressed a button to turn it on.

“I’m going to go ahead and start taxiing. You got that taken care of?”

“Yeah,” said Red, opening the little notebook he carried on him while flying and jotting down notes with the pen attached to it as weather information rolled from the speakers. Blue nodded at him, made a radio call over the communication frequency, added a little bit of power by pressing the throttle knob in, and the aircraft gently began to roll forward.

And with that, they were on their way to the runway.

Ten minutes later, the aircraft had passed the last of its “Before Takeoff” checks and was lined up on the runway. Red was at the controls for takeoff; he wanted to feel like he was doing something useful as a pilot after Blue had done all of the preflight checks and had taxied out here. Perfectly above the runway stripes, he jammed the throttle completely forward and the aircraft kicked into motion. The airspeed indicator’s needle jumped up, and Red called out, “Airspeed’s alive.”

When the little white needle hit 55 knots on the face of the instrument, he pulled back on the yoke. A bit of resistance, but then the little Cessna’s nosewheel lifted, followed by the two rear main wheels. Red pulled back more, and the aircraft pitched away from the ground and into the big blue sky, and just like that, they were flying. Passing over the tops of the trees and the opposite end of the runway, Red watched the airspeed indicator and altimeter carefully as they continued to climb. At about a thousand feet, Blue made a radio call, and Red turned away from the airport as they continued their ascent.

Climbing to a high enough altitude to safely practice spins in an aircraft as small as their Cessna was a lengthy process, but Red was okay with that. While they slowly but steadily climbed, he recalled the recovery procedure for spins, and recited it in his mind over and over again. Blue scanned the space around them, peering down through the left window at the landscape below.

“Hey,” he said, pointing. “We’re passing over our apartment right now.”

Red couldn’t resist the warmth that bloomed in his chest at the statement. Our apartment. They had decided to move in with each other a while ago, but the novelty of living with his best friend had yet to wear off. He loved that he had someone to come home to, and that someone was Blue. Sure, he was a little messy, but Red didn’t particularly mind. The little bit of extra cleaning he had to do to compensate for Blue’s chaos was an acceptable price to pay for his exceptional company. He loved the evenings they spent talking about their students, creating lesson plans for their flights and working out problems together, the late nights they spent quizzing each other in preparation for their next checkrides.

As he thought about how much he cared about him, and how happy he was that they were living together now, he abandoned running through the procedure again in his mind. Oh well. It was something he had long since memorized, anyway. He was sure he would remember what to do when the time came.

Finally, the altimeter reached 6000 feet, and Red leveled off, carefully adjusting the trim wheel for the aircraft to maintain the same altitude. Blue made a radio call. For a few moments, they flew straight and level, and Red looked out the window at the world around them, noticing how beautiful and smooth the sky was at this altitude, and how small everything looked down below.

“Cool, we made it,” Blue commented. “So, how do you want to do this?”

Red shook his head. “It’s up to you.”

“Ok, then, how about this? We take turns. One of us spins, the other recovers.”

Red shrugged. “Fine with me.”

“Should I go first?”

“Only if you’re going to give me a challenge.”

Blue gave him an amused look. His eyebrows hitched up, and a devious light danced in his eyes. “Oh, you want a challenge?”

Without warning, he jammed the throttle all the way in, and the propeller ripped into a roar. Just as quickly, he pulled the yoke as far back as it would go into his chest and the nose pitched up dramatically into the big blue sky and the stall warning horn screamed shrilly. Blue then tipped the yoke to the left and kicked the left rudder all the way to the wall as if it had offended him. Red felt his heart hop into his throat and briefly felt faint with fear as the engine wailed and the plane flipped upside down, and the sky was down and the ground was up for a brief second.

And then they were spinning. One rotation. Two. Fields and trees and houses whirled around and around in his vision. Blue held the rudder input and the yoke tightly. Red remembered suddenly that he was supposed to recover.

Red noted the neutral position of the yoke and pulled the throttle out. He took over the controls and Blue let him, relieving all pressure on the left rudder and pressing very gently on the right. The Cessna broke out of the spin and into a dive. Red pulled up on the yoke and the nose sluggishly drug up and he felt the force of gravity put pressure on his forehead and eyes and stomach as the aircraft returned slowly to a level attitude. It wasn’t until the aircraft ceased its descent that Red felt he could breathe again.

“Nice,” Blue said. “Recovery was kind of slow, though.”

Red gave him a look. “Seriously? We are supposed to do at least two rotations.”

“We did at least three, maybe four, before you recovered.”

Feeling a competitive irritation spark in his stomach, he quipped, “I’d love to see you do better.”

“I will,” he shot back, “Easily.”

“Fine,” Red growled, already shoving the throttle in. “Prove it.”

Red quickly did exactly what Blue had just done, except to the right instead of the left. The little airplane’s belly turned to the sky then dropped straight down. His intention had been to make the spin as terrifying as possible, but when he turned to see Blue’s reaction, he was surprised to see that he was the picture of calm. After exactly two rotations he recovered and pulled so smoothly out of the dive that he hardly felt it. Once the plane was level again, he casually trimmed it and let go of the yoke, shooting Red a grin. “How was that?” He asked.

It was amazing. It was masterful. Blue was the best pilot he knew, and although Red knew he wasn’t half bad himself, he couldn’t help but envy his partner’s superior skill and talent from time to time. That wasn’t to say he had ever admitted that Blue was a better pilot than him. He never had, and he probably never would.

“It was good,” he said mildly. He racked his mind for some sort of feedback he could give him, but came up empty. He didn’t think there was any way the recovery could be improved—it was perfect as is. So he just left it at that.

“Just ‘good,’ huh?” Asked Blue. He snorted into the microphone. “Ok, your turn again.”

After a brief climb back up to 6000 feet, Blue said, “Alright, get ready,” and abruptly yanked up and kicked the rudder over just like he had the first time. He laughed and gave a little, triumphant “Woo!” When the airplane flipped over and sent them into another spiraling nosedive. This time, Red took over the flight controls and snapped them out of the spin almost immediately.

“Aw,” Blue lamented. “That wasn’t even two rotations!”

“You want to do more, be my guest,” said Red, and set them up for another spin.

For the next thirty minutes or so, Red and Blue took turns doing spins and recovering from them. By Red’s third turn, he had forgotten all about being worried with them before, his uncertainty lost in the confidence he built through repetition and the light sound of Blue’s laughter in his ears. Blue was having a blast doing spins, and he was too, now. It was impossible for your blood to stand still while doing a spin—it was too exhilarating, too demanding for it to feel anything but excitement rush through your limbs and hold off your breath until the dive had been recovered from and level flight was attained again.

Eventually, though, the top of the sky began to darken as the sun began to burn low along the horizon. At some point, Blue ruefully pointed it out, and they did a couple more spins to lose altitude before heading back to the airport.

“Hey, how about we make this flight interesting?” Blue said, grinning at him again, as they were nearing the airfield.

Red gave him a look. “Excuse me? This flight isn’t interesting enough?”

Blue laughed. Instead of answering, he asked another question. “How long has it been since you’ve practiced a power-off landing?”

Red thought. It had been a while, at least several months. The last time he had done a power-off landing--that was, a landing without use of engine power--was as demonstration to one of his students who was working on his commercial rating.

“I don’t know. A while, though,” he answered.

“Great. Sounds like we could both use a refresher, then,” Blue said. Sitting up straighter, he looked over at him again. “How would you like to take a bet?”

“What’s the bet?”

“That I can do a power-off landing better than you.”

Red snorted. He rolled his eyes. “Whatever,” he said.

“Well? What do you think? Loser has to buy dinner tonight?”

Thinking that Blue was probably going to do better than him because Blue had done the maneuver in question more than he had in the past couple months, and that he was planning on buying dinner anyway, Red replied, “Ok. You’re on.”

“Alright!” Blue said, grinning. “Who goes first?”

“I’ve got your power,” Red announced in response, moving his hand over to the throttle control as Blue let his drop away.

“Ok, then,” Blue said, unbothered. “Let’s go through the before-landing checklist…”

He quickly ran through the few items on the checklist without even referencing it, then turned his eyes back to the runway that they were now flying parallel to, then the airspeed and altimeter again. Red waited until the big white runway numbers reached their wingtip, then pulled the throttle knob all the way out.

The propeller shuddered and the engine moaned, letting out a sound not unlike a yawn as all of the thrust that it had been producing suddenly fell away. Blue calmly pulled back on the yoke, letting the airspeed drop down, and then further, until he captured exactly 68 knots and released some of the pressure.

The sound of the oncoming wind whistled in the relative silence as he began a descending left-hand turn. As was customary, Red made the base-turn radio call for him. Blue, focused on the runway, seemed scarcely to breathe as he put in some flaps, which allowed them to descend at a steeper, slower angle. He smoothly tilted the yoke left again, lining their nose with the numbers on the runway, and after some consideration, put in even more flaps. Red called their final.

“What’s your target?” Red asked.

“The numbers,” Blue answered, his voice a bit tense. A glance out of the windshield told him why. They were too high; he was going to miss them, at least by a little bit.

The airspeed indicator hovered at 65 as Blue guided the aircraft over the grass. Fifty feet or so before the runway threshold, he began pulling back on the yoke, tilting the nose of the aircraft away from the lights that stuck out of the dirt at the end of the runway. They sank lower to the earth, barely gracing the air above the runway as asphalt gave way beneath them. The row of broad white stripes marked the runway threshold spread beneath them, and the numbers followed.

Blue pulled back, gently, and then again with more force. The back wheels kissed the runway surface, nearly simultaneously. He held off the nose a little bit longer, then released it, softly. The nose wheel connected with the asphalt, and he pulled back again, aerodynamically slowing their roll and applying the tiniest amount of brake. Red, meanwhile, cleaned up—putting the flaps back up and resetting the trim wheel to neutral.

“Well, damn,” Blue commented, letting out a breath. “I missed them.”

“Just barely,” Red replied, taking over the flight controls. He rammed the throttle all the way in again, and the engine roared back to life. “I’d say you missed them by fifty feet, if that.”

The tiny airplane shuddered a bit on takeoff roll, as if shaking off the pressure of suddenly being forced into motion again. “55 knots, rotate,” Red commented, pulling back on the yoke and sending the airplane into the sky again.

Red climbed straight ahead until the altimeter read about 800 feet above the surface of the Earth, then guided the plane into a sharp 90 degree left hand turn, following a rectangular pattern designed to align them back up with the runway for another landing, commonly referred to as the ‘traffic pattern’ for the airport. He continued the climb as Blue called crosswind, and shortly after made another 90 degree turn to place their little Cessna on a path directly parallel to the runway. He released the back pressure he was holding on the yoke, bringing the aircraft back to level flight, and pulled out the throttle a bit to prevent inadvertently climbing anymore.

“My power,” Blue informed him, moving his hand over the throttle knob. Their fingers briefly brushed as Red drew his hand away. For some reason, as they neared the end of the runway, excitement built in his stomach again with the anticipation of Blue pulling all of the power out. For a minute he felt like a student pilot on his first solo flight, all nervous energy and desire to succeed.

The end of the runway came. Blue pulled out the power. The engine went idle.

In his mind, Red ran through the emergency landing checklist that had been drilled in his head since the very beginning of flight training. _Airspeed_ was the first word that flashed in his skull, his highest and most urgent priority. For each airplane, a certain speed existed at which the longest possible glide could be attained, and for this airplane, that speed was exactly 68 knots. He pitched up, letting them decelerate until that speed was attained, then released the aircraft to glide in for landing.

Aiming for the numbers as well, Red timed his turn into the runway to be slightly further away than Blue had done his, judging by where they had ended up landing the last time. One set of flaps. Two. He was vaguely aware of Blue calling final as he turned into the final approach course, and the runway spread before them like a long marked ribbon. He judged his glide-slope to be nearly perfect, his heading spot-on. This was going to be a perfect power-off landing, he could just tell.

The Cessna crossed the barrier between the grass and the runway. Red pulled back, guiding the plane smoothly into its landing flare. The back two wheels touched down directly on top of the runway numbers, and the nose wheel shortly after that.

“Damn it,” Blue cursed, “I guess you--”

Before he could finish, Red turned around and kissed him. A short, surprised little sound escaped Blue’s lips before he actually registered what was happening and returned the kiss. For several seconds, they took each other in hungrily, passionately, compressing all of the emotions they’d explored in the past hour and a half flying in a single point in time.

They jerked apart when a staticky transmission burst from the radio, making both of them jump. It was someone from their flight school, evidently just having gotten their engines started, making a radio check. “Loud and clear,” Blue answered breathlessly, and in reply received two clicks of the mic from the other pilot, an understood acknowledgement.

Red didn’t remember bringing the aircraft to a stop on the runway, but he must have, because they were motionless and he was holding his feet on the brakes. It was a good thing, too, because otherwise they probably would have ended up rolling into the grass. As much as he loved Blue, he didn’t really want to have to end up explaining mud on the tires and grass on the propeller to the flight school owner.

Very slowly and carefully, they began to taxi back to the parking lot.

“So, where do you want to eat tonight?” asked Blue.

Red shrugged. “It's up to you.”

“No, you choose. I’m the one buying.”

Red shook his head. “No you’re not.”

Blue looked at him in disbelief and let out an airy laugh. “It doesn’t work that way,” he insisted. “We agreed on the rules beforehand. I’m buying dinner, and there’s no way you’re talking me out of it.”

“Maybe we should do one more power-off landing,” Red replied.

“Like hell we are. I’m just going to have to beat you next time.”

And thus began their regular spin flights, each one punctuated by a new aeronautical challenge. They continued to build and challenge each other, week after week and year after year, long after they hit the flight-hour milestone to apply to fly for the airlines, and even after that.

Until neither of them could fly anymore, they would spin together.


End file.
